- Digital Strategy
- Web Design
AND Digital
A clean, modern design for one of the UK’s largest digital players
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Ageing Infrastructure
The existing AND Digital site had been depreciating over time due to being built in-house without dedicated support. There was limited on-page tracking, but that which did exist highlighted numerous UX issues. The UI was outdated, and did not reflect the growth and position in the industry which AND had grown into since its development years earlier.
Discovery
Interviews
Interviews with senior leadership and a stakeholder team were undertaken to get an understanding of AND’s needs. A significant goal was also to bolster recruitment efforts, so Crucible carried out interviews with recent hires within the business to understand which aspects were most important when visiting the websites of potential employers.
Design Rationale
Building something which is clean, functional, and allows us to learn about the user
Because of a lack of on-page data, we resolved that our rationale would be to build a site which is functional, clean, and allows the AND marketing team to learn about their users for future iterations. It would have been unwise to work towards a design which pushed the boundaries too far, because this would have been designed without this data in place. Rather, the best solution would be to create a usable, trackable site, from which identity expressions can be pushed out based on learnings.
Designing within the current brand
The current brand was a strong expression of colour, and went down well with clients. It was very personal, and the visual identity was memorable. It was decided that we would work within the brand expressions of colours and fonts, and that Crucible’s our contribution to the design would be to ensure a clean and usable user experience within the identity’s design language.
UX Rationale
Linking up dead ends
Asides from the lack of tech, one of the main factors which prevented the gathering of meaningful user data was a difficult navigation; there were several pages which were unintuitively siloed by topics which users wouldn’t recognise. We completely restructured the approach to the menu and altered the information architecture dramatically on best practice.
The rationale for design was to build a user journey based on content, which would allow the user to thematically browse through the various facets and stems of the site. By doing so, the information architecture was linked up and became fluid, and unhelpful silos were broken down. This approach was also necessitated by the business’s content marketing model efforts.
Agile working with Agile Masters
AND are fully native in Agile methodologies, and because the site’s development was being undertaken by one of their clubs, it was important that we embed ourselves into the emergent product team. Our Project Manager attended each stand-up, and the backlog was refined by Crucible’s input.
Delivering designs to an external build team wasn’t our native workflow, but the thorough preparation of materials and the integration within the team allowed for an efficient handover of materials.